


The Paper Asks Nothing

by ameliacareful



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean is possessed, Demons, Gen, Hurt!Sam, Possession, hurt!Dean, underage refers to teenaged Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-09-30 01:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10149842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/pseuds/ameliacareful
Summary: When Dean is possessed, Sam is frantic that Dean not experience what he knows possession to be like.  Dean's experience of possession means not only loosing bodily autonomy but being tortured with his own worst memories and fears.





	1. One (Sam.)

            The worst mistake you can make, John Winchester always said, is to think something is easy. Sam believed that. Researched everything. Every salt and burn. Every poltergeist. Fought Dean to try to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Not that they could really ever get all the intel.

            Sam never took demons for granted. Hated possession more than anything.

            Sulfur didn’t always smell like swamp gas, like rotten eggs. In the darkness of this suburban foyer, Sam smelled match heads. It was a smell with both bad and good associations, with demons and bone burnings. He followed Dean’s back, his shotgun pointed down because even if it was rock salt, if Dean turned around abruptly, two shot gun shells of rock salt from three feet away would permanently blind him at the very least.

            Everything narrowed down in a hunt, everything was right now. There was no sound except a muffled something that stopped, but that was enough to take make them back out of the living room that even in the light from a streetlight looked as if no one used it and go up the stairs. Pitch dark hallway. Dean picked what was probably the master suite because demons had the imagination of cockroaches and inevitably liked master suites and nurseries. The smell of match heads was stronger. When they went somewhere that was really demon infested, where the meatsuits were long dead or where the demons had been staying—like one of Crowley’s places—that was when the sulfur smell was really rotten egg bad. Then Dean was more likely to gank first, ask questions later. Maybe they could save the people here.

            Sam felt the back of his neck prickling and glanced over his shoulder but he couldn’t see anything in the blackness. The furnace kicked on and he startled just slightly. There was a bedroom and the streetlight showed a bed with a pile of unfolded laundry and on the floor was a cardboard box with X-mas decorations stacked on it. Sam had been in a lot of houses and seen a lot of ‘guest’ bedrooms. He ignored it.

            Dean stopped by the half open door to the master suite. Sam knew where Dean was, couldn’t say how he knew since he couldn’t see Dean, could just sense him in the darkness. Someone was crying inside, hopeless little hitches of breath. They weren’t expecting any help.

            Some things, when you flicked on the light, they’d be blinded. Vamps and werewolves were sensitive to light. Demons and ghosts, not. As best as they’d been able to work out, a couple lived here and the crying sounded like a woman. If they had time, they could have set up a devil’s trap, brought the possessed husband into it, but that wasn’t going to happen.

            The light in the bedroom flicked on. A man’s voice said, “Come in.”

            Dean stood a moment, silhouetted, adjusting to the change in illumination.

            It was an aspirational bedroom. Sam thought of them as cable TV bedrooms, inspired by decorating shows. It was small but the walls were painted some shade of blue instead of left off white and there were a bunch of fancy pillows on the floor, some marked now with rusty streaks of dried blood. There was a woman tied up in a kitchen chair, eye makeup running down her face. There was a man sitting on the fancy patterned sheets of the unmade bed.

            “Hunters,” the man said and blinked black. “It’s your lucky day, Emma.”

            She whimpered.

            Dean fired a round of salt into the guy’s chest and Sam chanted, “ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus omnis satanica potestas…”_

            The thing wearing the woman’s husband reeled back. Dean took a couple of steps forward to keep it in his sights and when it started to get back up he flung holy water at it. Timing was everything. The job was to keep it from shutting them up until they could get it exorcised.

            The woman screamed. Sam chanted. He had his own holy water out for when Dean ran out—something punched him in the chest and slammed him back and up the wall and the back of his head bounced against the wallboard.

            Dean’s shotgun went off and his slid back down the wall and started chanting again. In the back of his head Sam remembered his dad making him learn ‘this is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine.’ Teaching him the importance of not losing focus of what ever is the most important thing he was doing in a fight. Like not losing his place in an exorcism.

            He still had his shotgun, too. He heard Dean grunt so he fired his shotgun. He hoped the woman had her head down. She screamed, he chanted—

            The demon smoked out before Sam got halfway through the exorcism. And the room was suddenly silent.

            Sam’s ears were ringing. Shotgun blasts did that.

            “Sam?” Dean said.

            “Okay. You?”

            “I’m good.”

            Sam got his feet under him and used the wall at his back to help him get up. The woman started crying again. Dean was on the floor by a set of drawers but he was running the back of his hand under his nose to see if it was bleeding and he looked pretty normal.

            Sam checked the guy who’d been hosting the demon. He was alive, breathing, not conscious. He didn’t look great.

            “Julio?” Emma said.

            “He’s alive,” Sam said. “We’re going to call 911.”

            “What was, what was… he hurt me.”

            “It wasn’t Julio,” Sam said. He knee walked to her. The knots were good, too tight. Her hands were purple from lack of circulation and the ropes around her chest cut into her upper arms. She looked a little like Ruby only she was Latina, darker. Sam cut her loose and took her hands in his and tried to gently work a little circulation back in.

            “It hurts,” she said.

            She had a cut lip and he could only imagine what the blood on the pillows meant.

            “Do you have someone you could call?” Sam asked. “Your mom?”

            “Did it say what it wanted?” Dean asked.

            “Who are you? How did you know?” she asked.

            “I’m Dean. This is my brother Sam.” Dean put the demon hunting knife on the chest of drawers. “We’re hunters. You want to give her the—” Dean made a kind of circling motion with two fingers meaning ‘things that go bump in the night talk’.

            Her eyes lit up and blinked black and she threw her hands out and threw them both hard against the opposite walls. “Sam and Dean? Winchesters? You’re kidding! I feel all tingly!”

            Sam couldn’t speak, couldn’t breath. He could see Dean on the other wall. Stupid. It had never occurred to him that both of them might be possessed. That this might be some sort of trap.

            She stood up, picked up the demon knife.

            “I’ve heard all about you!” She looked at Dean. “You’re a Knight of Hell! Well,” she pouted, “you were. And you didn’t do much. If I were a Knight of Hell, I’d do so many things.” She tested the edge of the demon blade.

            She glanced at Sam, frowning. “You’re Lucifer bait. He’s, like, obsessed with you. Wants to make you watch.” Then back to Dean. “But you…I don’t really think he cares so much about you. I mean, Crowley does but fuck him. I only want to try you out.”

            Sam was seeing black spots and he could see his brother was choking out, too.

            “You’re protected,” the demon said, her voice getting farther away. She walked up to Dean and looked around his neck. “Oh, nice tattoo!”

            _No no no no no no no._

            She slashed Dean’s tattoo, threw her head back and opened her mouth as Sam blacked out.

            He gasped and blinked in time to see Dean stand up. He was still too anoxic to do more than try to drag in air.

            “Whoa,” The demon in Dean said. “This is like going from a Kia to a Maserati. Talk about meat suits. You are awesome!” It said ‘awesome’ just like his brother.

            “Dean,” Sam gasped.

            “Hey there Sam. Did you know your brother is built for performance?” the demon said. “I mean, you ought to try this! Well, except for the fact that you chose to stay human and all that.” Dean leaned way down to look him in the face. Beyond him was that stupid rusty-blood streaked decorator pillow and beyond that Emma. “Looking a little out of breath, Sammy-boy.” He grabbed Sam around the neck and hauled him to his feet.

            Sam saw black at the corners of his vision again.

            “Dean’s never been possessed!” he said. “Can you imagine! Sam practically advertises on Craig’s List, the whore!”

            No, Sam kept thinking. Dean couldn’t be possessed. He couldn’t— Just no no no no no.

            “Not the first time you’ve been in a position to kill Sam, I see,” the demon said, smiling just the way Dean had stalking through the bunker with a hammer. “Everybody thinks you’re soooooo close but dude. Look at the inside of your head. You’re just both all messed up. So complicated! Can’t live with each other, can’t stand to be apart.” The black was creeping in, the voice of the demon who sounded like Dean getting farther and farther away. “Calling him to restaurant to kill him? The whole on his knees thing? You’re a sick fuck. Blame it on the mark on you want but that has to have something to work on—”

            He passed out.

            Fear first, then sound, then maybe a mash of sensation and then the sense that wait, he was on his knees. Someone was talking. Something on his face. He made out what— “Hey, hey, hey,” Dean said gently. It was cold under his knees and he was slumped down on his heels. Awkward. Uncomfortable. Dean had him, a hand behind his head supporting him because it was hard to hold his head up. Dean’s chest was close and Sam could feel the warmth of him.

            “Sammy,” Dean said. “Look at me. Look at me. You’re okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

            Sam could feel his mouth open, slack. He tried to focus. Dizzy as fuck.

            Dean was looking at him.

            “You blacked out, dude. Demon. Remember?”

            Remembering took a bit. “Dean?” Sam blinked. He was in a garage. Suburban two car garage, at night. There was a white SUV parked on one side. The floor was concrete and cold. Weed whacker. Those home depot shelves with paint cans and tools and storage bins and shit.

            “Look what I found?” Dean said. He held up a hammer. Wooden handle, steel head.

            Sam felt his heart stutter.

            Dean blinked black.

            _Cas,_ Sam prayed in an instant, his first and last coherent thought, _Dean is possessed and he’s going to kill me. You have to save him. I’m sorry_. He tried to throw himself away from his brother and then there was nothing.

 


	2. Two (Dean.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean is possessed, and the demon fingers through his worst memories.

            Dean was helpless and it was more horrible, leaving Sam behind, skull cracked, and walking out to the Impala and opening the door, his hands, his legs, moving even as he fought. He tried. Bobby had fought off a demon. Sam had fought off Lucifer, taking back control. He could do this; he just didn’t even know what _fighting_ meant. He raged helplessly, trying to walk himself, to stop his hand from turning the ignition. Get out get out get out! He had to get back to Sam.

            _Dean, the demon crooned on his mind._

            In his mind. It was in his mind. Baby rumbled to life.

            _Oh yes, sweetcakes,_ it whispered. _I’m right here._ It was impossible to tell if it was male or female. It was like crude oil, like grease, everywhere inside his thoughts.

            _Oh look at what’s in your memories, you’re a bastard, you know that? Look at the things you think. Here’s that moment where you thought Donna was sounding like a fat hick even if you didn’t say it. And Jody was showing her age right there under her jaw, no wonder dating is hard. Here’s where you wished your brother would just shut the fuck up. And oh, oh! look at this…_

_Fourteen years old in the back of a bar by the men’s room. A cigarette machine. Winstons and Marlboros, the buttons glowing lit like slots. He doesn’t have any money, he’s checking the coin return. He always gives the coin return a quick check, every pay phone. Sometimes he can snag a quarter. The men’s room door opens. What the fuck state are they in that the place even has a cigarette machine. Hey kid, the guy grins. I used to do that._

_Dean grins back up because you can’t blame a kid for trying._

            He is twisting at the memory. Living it. Knowing what is coming.

            _The man asked something, something about Dean knowing a way to make fifty. The guy was serious and Dean always looked a little older than his age—not physically but he just gave off this thing. The guy was straight, asking Dean like he was an equal. Dean saying yeah, he knew what he meant._

_The guy saying men’s room or out back._

            Twisting to try to get away but the demon is in his mind. The Impala rumbling down the road.

            _Out back because the men’s room is skeevy. Dean knowing it is dirty but thinking it’s about kissing because he knows what sex is he isn’t stupid but he doesn’t have a pussy and outside it’s late afternoon and he can’t even hear the crack of pool balls, his dad hustling…_

_…hustling Dean, while the guy has you get on your knees and you’re wondering if he’s going to get on his knees to make out with you only he unbuttons his jeans and he hasn’t even got underwear and that’s a bit of a shock to you at fourteen, isn’t it. The smell, and his thick sweaty groin hair, but the pissy stink, and his uncircumcised cock, long and thin, darkening in his hand. It’s not completely hard yet and that’s what he pees out of. There’s a bit of lint on some white dried stuff. ‘Suck it’ he says and Dean feels sick but he does because he’s supposed to know how to make a fifty, he said he knew how to make a fifty. He puts his mouth on it and sucks a little. The man doesn’t do anything so he keeps the tip of it in his mouth, sucking like it’s a lollypop and the man finally says, ‘deeper’ so Dean does, eyes watering. He wants to stop, but he knows from masturbating what’s supposed to happen only it doesn’t happen very fast, not like when he’s doing himself. Dean has to keep sucking on it for a long time. Come on, he thinks. Come on, just do it. He thinks the guy is not coming on purpose. He wants to cry. Another guy comes out the back door to go to his truck and looks at them while he’s walking and Dean is thinking don’t tell my dad don’t tell my dad and sucking and it doesn’t taste like piss anymore it just tastes like saliva and the man puts his hand against the wall of the bar. Then he makes a noise and shakes and it’s like snot in Dean’s mouth, bitter and gross and salty and thick. Dean gags and spits._

_The man tucks back in ._

_Did he say something? Something about not swallowing, Dean is pretty sure of it. There was stuff on the shoulder of Dean’s shirt. Come. He gave Dean two twenties and two fives and went back in the bar and Dean didn’t even cry or throw up. It was his first time. Later, when he was older, he would do it again so he and Sammy didn’t get thrown out of a motel and he would do it after that for food._

_But the first time was for fifty bucks, you pretty little whore. He wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t agree to it. It was because you agreed to it. You agreed._

_His dad asked him what was on his shirt. He was pretty sure his dad guessed but after the shtriga, maybe John didn’t expect better. His dad was really critical of Sammy because he loved Sammy and knew what he was capable of and Sammy could still disappoint him but Dean, every time Dean got praised he knew it was because his dad was kind of surprised he hadn’t completely fucked up everything._

_What about that time you got really mad—_

            The litany didn’t stop. One horrible moment of Dean’s greatest hits after another.

 

#

(Sam.)          

            He smelled blood and dust. Smell was the first thing to come back. Then hearing.

            “Don’t touch him, Crowley.”

            “Why would I touch him? This suit is Ermenegildo Zegna bespoke. $22k, Feathers.”

            He could feel the grace knitting bone as he was replaying the conversation. It had just been noise but now it was words. Not necessarily meaningful words.

            Cold, wet, sticky, concrete. Not a value judgment, just an observation.

            “Well at least his eye is back where it is supposed to be.” Accent. Crowley.

            Hands on him, pulling him upright. He flailed a little, trying ineffectively to get them off because he didn’t yet have much control over what he was doing. He was drunk. Something.

            Cas was crouched in front of him. They were in…a garage? There was a naked light bulb on over them and a white SUV parked next to them with a spray of bright blood across it. The blood was still pretty fresh so half an hour or less. Blood on the floor and all over his jacket. There was a hammer with bits of blood and flesh and longish hair glued to the head. The hammer had a wooden handle. Cas looking at him with an expression of Cas-like intensity.  

            Cas’ trench coat spread out around him rather like the train of a wedding dress. Well, not anything like the train of a wedding dress, on consideration, it was a trench coat. Sam felt himself looking at Cas’ shoes. Florsheim’s maybe? This did not seem like the time to ask Cas where he got his shoes. His thoughts were like cats and seemed resistant to herding.

            “Where is Dean?” Cas asked.

            “He isn’t here?” Sam felt like there was rust between the mechanism of his teeth, tongue, and brain.

            “You prayed to me and said he was possessed, he was going to kill you, and that I should save him.”

            “I did?”

            Crowley rolled his eyes.

            “Yes,” Cas said. “Apparently the experience did not get fixed in memory before he hit you with the hammer.”

            “Oh,” Sam said. Possessed Dean hit him with a hammer. “In the head?”

            “You ducked,” Crowley said. “More sense than I gave you credit for, really.”

            “Yes,” Cas said. “The demon still did a lot of damage, blinded you in one eye and you would have died but we found the research material you had left in the bunker, then your hotel, then found you here, then I healed you. I’m sorry it took so long.”

            “Not that long,” Crowley said.

            “Thirty-two minutes, seven seconds.”

            “Dean’s not here?” Sam asked.

            “What do you remember?”

            Sam went to run his fingers through his hair only to find one side was sticky and matted with blood. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “We were tracking demon activity,” he said. “The husband here had been acting out of character…he’s an insurance guy…weird stuff?” he hazarded. “He…no they were upstairs. Wait, she was possessed too? I think? Did you check upstairs?”

            Cas helped Sam to his feet. Sam felt okay, he just had holes in his memory.

            Just inside the door to the garage was a tiny half bath. The tub and sink were blue. Sam looked in the mirror. His face was in dried blood, black-red and crusted with stuff, and his eyes looked out of it all like it was a mask. He washed his face and tried to rinse his hair but the sink was small. He thought he got most of it.

            Dean was possessed.

            Flicker of something, a slash of a knife against Dean’s chest against his tattoo.

            He went to find Cas and Crowley upstairs. Cas was helping a woman sit on the bed. A man was standing back by the wall, his mouth open in shock.

            “You’re one of them,” the woman said. “But you’re not the one it wanted.”

            He remembered her possessed. Strutting. Excited because Dean had been a Knight of Hell. Playing with the edge of the demon blade and talking about all the things she’d do if she were a Knight of Hell.

            “It possessed my brother,” Sam said.

            “Can you track it down?” Cas asked Crowley.

            “It’s not like they all have chips in them,” Crowley said.

            Cas glared.

            “No one listens to me these days, Hell is a mess,” Crowley said, “Lucifer was in charge, remember? They’re acting like demons, they’re doing what demons do!”

            Dean, who faced every danger but his own feelings. Dean was possessed. Sam had to get to him.


	3. Three (Mary.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mary joins Sam, Cas, and Crowley to try to track the demon possessing Dean.

            Mary Winchester still jumped whenever her purse rang. Phones went with houses and offices, not people.

            “Sam?” she said. She felt as if she was supposed to pretend she didn’t know who was calling and just say ‘hello’ but it said right on the phone that it was Sam. Also that she’d missed a text.

            “Mom,” Sam said. “Have you heard from Dean?”

            “No, although I got a text and didn’t hear it. I was driving and you said not to do anything with my phone while I was driving—”

            “I want you to turn off your phone,” Sam said, his voice ragged in her ear.

            “What?” she said. She knew phones could run out of charge. She sort of knew they could be turned off.

            “Do you know how?” he said.

            “No?” she said.

            “Okay,” he said. “That’s all right. I’m going to give you my phone number to write down and I want you to buy a new phone—” someone interrupted him and he moved the phone away to talk to them. She waited. She was in a restaurant. It was a nice place that sold sandwiches and soup. She liked them but she had to be careful, or clam chowder bread bowls were going to be the death of her. All these places to eat and her boys ate at diners. “Mom,” Sam continued, “where are you?”

            “I’m at a Panera in Austin, Texas.”

            Again, Sam talked to someone. Then, “Which one?”

            “It’s at the Lakeline Mall?”

            She heard a very British voice say clearly in the background say, “I’m not a bloody taxi service, Moose.”

            “I’ll talk to you in a moment,” Sam said to her. “If Dean calls, no matter what, don’t answer. Do you understand? It’s _not Dean_.”

            “Sam?” she said, “Wait!” But of course he was already no longer on the line. She thought about what to do next. Maybe get one of the muffins. One of the things that had changed since she died was the whole idea of muffins. Muffins were now the size of your head and tasted like cake. They were wonderful.

            She checked the text. It was a photo from Dean.

            For a moment she couldn’t figure out what it was, just blood and hair, then she realized that what she was seeing was a ruptured eye and socket, a shattered temple. That was Sam. His head and shoulder lying on a cement floor. Blood. Her handsome boy, disfigured.

            But she had just talked to Sam.

            The person in this photo was dead, or very close to it.

            Who had she just talked to?

            She started moving. She picked up her purse, paid her check like nothing was wrong. Her hands didn’t shake. She didn’t call Dean. She didn’t call Sam. She just pushed open the door and walked outside not thinking about anything, going on instinct. She looked for her car.

            Sam was walking across the blacktop parking lot towards her with Castiel and some man in a suit. Sam’s face was whole, not a mark on it, although his hair looked clumped and badly washed.

            “Stay away from me,” she said, reaching into her purse for her gun.

            “Mom?” Sam stopped. It looked like Sam. Plaid and t-shirt and jacket on this warm Austin winter day.

            “What are you?” she growled.

            “It’s me,” he said, his hands out and long fingers spread.

            “How did you get here?”

            “I brought them,” the man in the black suit said. “We haven’t met.”

            “Shut up, Crowley,” Castiel, the angel said. “Mary, what happened?”

            “Is that Sam?” she asked. She felt weirdly comfortable with the angel. “What is this?” She tossed him the phone.

            Castiel looked at the image. “It’s all right, this really is Sam. I healed him.” Then he dropped the phone to the asphalt and ground it under his shoe. “The demon possessing Dean would be able to track you using the GPS.”

            “Are you okay?” Sam asked. “What— did he call you?”

            A demon was possessing Dean? What was that photo? “You… you’ve got something in your hair,” Mary said. It looked like dried blood. Long strands of hair clumped together by dried blood.

            Sam reached up and touched his hair and looked a bit surprised. “I tried to get it out.”

            Mary had always prided herself on her ability to stay calm. She did not scream. She was not the kind of woman who screamed or cried. Not even when one of her boys was possessed and nearly murdered the other one.

 

#

           

            Sam came in with bags of food. More than they really needed, from a couple of different places. He dropped them on the table of the motel room and absently tried to run his hands through his still dirty hair. Mary watched him.

            She had started tacking up what little information they had. It wasn’t much. A map with a pin where Dean had been possessed. Circles indicating how far the demon could drive in 12 and 24 hours. Sam studied it carefully. She kept staring at his hair. At the clumps.

            “Steak?” Cas asked.

            “That’s mine,” Crowley said. He took the Styrofoam take out box and commandeered the desk.

            “Lasagna. That must be you, Mary.” Cas handed it to her and she opened it, looking inside. The lasagna looked very fancy. It came with breadsticks and salad.

            Cas opened the other bag. “I don’t eat, Sam.”

            “I know. Has the demon tried to call you?” Sam sat down at his laptop. “I’m going to check again to see if maybe it turned Dean’s GPS back on.” He didn’t really pay any attention to them.

            Nobody pointed out that that wasn’t likely. Mary watched Cas pull a burger and fries out of the second bag and then a large salad.

            Four meals, four people, but Cas didn’t eat, being an angel.

            “Is the burger for you?” Cas asked.

            “No,” Sam said, not looking at them. “We should call Jody, warn her and ask her to watch for police bulletins.” He was out of the chair and going through the contacts on his phone, filling the doorway for a moment, blocking the sunlight. “Jody? It’s Sam Winchester.” The door closed behind him.

            They looked at the burger. Dean’s burger.

            “Moose is off the rails,” Crowley observed.

            Cas looked consternated.

            Mary got up to go after him.

            “Don’t,” Crowley said.

            “I’m his mother,” she said.

            “I know,” Crowley said. “But those two have stopped the literal apocalypse and killed Death himself for each other. It’s not exactly a healthy model for a relationship. I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”

            “Someone said Sam was possessed by Lucifer,” Mary said.

            “Old history. Sam’s been possessed by everybody,” Crowley said.

            Cas looked irritated.

            “All right,” Crowley conceded. “Not everybody. A couple of demons, an angel or two. Some teenager, right? Switched bodies with him?”

            “I didn’t know about that,” Cas said.

            Mary felt sick. When she’d been possessed by the ghost, it has been like having someone’s hands all over her. “What about Dean, has he been possessed before?”

            “This is Dean’s first rise. Just got his cherry popped. He’s been a demon, but never been possessed by one.”

            “Shut up, Crowley,” Cas growled.

            “She asked,” Crowley said as the door opened. “A mother should know.”

            “Know what?” Sam asked.

            “Your mother wanted to know if Dean had ever been possessed before. I explained he was always a bridesmaid, never a bride. ‘Til now.”

            “Crowley,” Castiel growled.

            Crowley shrugged.

            Sam just appeared distracted and tried again to run his hand through his hair. It caught on the clumped strands on one side of his head.

            “You need a shower,” Mary said. “Then come and eat.”

            “Look, you three do whatever it is you do and I’ll put an APB out on the demon hotline,” Crowley said. “And find a better steak.” He was gone.

            Sam looked at the map. Then he grabbed his duffel and disappeared into the bathroom.

 


	4. Four (Dean.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The demon takes Dean to a club.

            It was not a bar that Dean would normally have picked. Dean liked shot and a beer bars. Bars with pool tables. Bars where the only difference between four in the afternoon and eleven at night were the amount of people. But suddenly he was in a place where the music was loud and he didn’t recognize it and it wasn’t from a juke box. He was dancing with a girl who was maybe thirty but probably not. She had those wings of eyeliner and hair that spilled over her bare shoulders.

            He glanced down (or the demon did) and he was wearing a black t-shirt (that he did own) and jeans.

            The girl was grinding his leg.

            Her skirt was the size of a beer cozy.

            It wasn’t that Dean had no appreciation for twenty-five year olds. He did, he really did. But he felt a lot older than his actual thirty-eight, something to do with life as a hunter and forty years in Hell and while he had no problem with women in their thirties, he liked someone he could…feel like didn’t make him a fucking perv. Someone with a bit of experience. Someone who could give back.

            _But look at that skin. Look at those lips. She’s not stupid, Dean, she told you she’s got a degree in finance and works at Goldman Sachs, a big stockbroker, doing analysis. You told her all about your interest in corporate mergers and changing the tax structure. Don’t you remember? Oh wait, you don’t know jack shit about that. You can barely calculate tax and tip on a restaurant bill._

            They were outside on the sidewalk. How did they get outside? He had his arms around her and her hair smelled like cucumber and melon. It smelled so clean.

            “I love older men,” she was saying. “The guys at work who are my age, you know, down in the bullpen? In stocks? They are all douchbags. Treat women like we’re all supposed to suck their dicks.” She looked up at him, “Oh God, I’m sorry. That just came out of my mouth. It’s the alcohol. I feel like I can say anything to you, you know? I love the way you have those crinkles at your eyes when you smile.” She reached up and touched the edge of his eye and he could feel it but he couldn’t open his mouth and tell her to run. “I work all the time,” she said. “But those guys are going to be partners before me because they’re guys and it’s not fair.”

            He kissed her and her mouth tasted like vodka and olives.

            _Dean, you cradle snatcher. You older man._

_There’s the Uber. Do you even know what Uber is?_

            She was spread out on the bed and her eye makeup no longer had those wings. She looked like a raccoon. She was a mess of tears and snot. She had a black bra and lacy black panties and she kept trying to draw her knees up but he’d tied her to the bed. She was like a butterfly mounted for him.

            She was weeping.

            “You’re a very smart girl,” Dean’s voice said. “You thought that made a difference. You thought that when push came to shove—” he sat down on the end on the bed and ran a finger up her calf, “you could count on your brain.”

            “Your eyes,” she said. “Your eyes. Your eyes.”

            His eyes must be black.

            “You know what I am?” Dean’s voice asked.

            She shook her head.

            “I’m a very angry man,” Dean said. “When I’m angry I can really feel. It’s like a drug. It’s what I do when I’m worried. It’s what I do when I’m scared. It’s what I do when I don’t want to feel bad. I get angry.” He looked up at her and smiled into her terrified face. “I studied torture for ten years.”

            _Cas came and got him then. Cas wasn’t going to come in time for this._

            He crawled up on the bed.

            She was frozen, her face gone slack with fear.

            _Dean could feel what the demon was going to do. A thin knife inserted in her joints between the silver sheen of ligament from bone fanning over muscle. He could feel how there would be hours with that thin and flexible fish knife in the kitchen. In and around the orbit of an eye._

_Everything seemed to kind of…flicker._

            _Maybe it was remembering his own time in Hell. Maybe it was because he had once been a fucking Knight of Hell but it seemed as if taking back his own body was easy. He could just reach out and his hand was his own._

            He straightened up, kneeling on the bed, flexing his hands.

            “It’s gonna be okay,” he said. “I’ve got him.” Sam, in Stull, saying those words to him. ‘I’ve got him, Dean.’

            He felt it struggling in him. Said the words of his own exorcism until the thing shoved itself out of him, his head forced back and black smoke, oily and tasting of sulfur and something forgotten from the bottom of the meat drawer of the fridge blasted out of him.

            It pooled around the ceiling, eddying like it was considering the girl.

            “Get out or I’ll blast you to Hell,” Dean ground out.

            The smoke of the demon found a vent and trailed out. Dean watched the last of it swirl.

            “Please,” the girl whispered.

            “No no nonono,” Dean said. “You’re all right now. It’s gone.” He untied her and she scrunched up to the head of the bed. He looked around. It was a loft apartment, all one space for a bedroom, living room, kitchen.

            “What are you?” she asked, still so quiet.

            “I’m just a man,” Dean said. “I was possessed. By a demon.”

 

#

 

            Dean taught her how to salt her windowsills and doorways. Everything felt as if his fingertips were a little oily. Everything smelled of sulfur. He wanted to shower for days. He didn’t even know her name and she kept flinching.

            He left and found himself on a sidewalk in some part of town called the Gold Coast although it just felt cold and damp. He didn’t have a jacket. Demons didn’t need them, apparently.

            He was in Chicago, of all places. Could have been worse, he supposed, could have been Detroit, the epicenter of demon nightmares. He had no idea where the Impala was. He had $2,174 in his wallet from who knew where. He still had his phone. He pulled it out and on a whim checked his photos for any ideas on what could have happened. There were photos of him and the girl in the club. Photos of him and strangers from a night he didn’t remember. Two nights maybe. A fight with a guy he had clearly won (he hoped the guy was still breathing, it looked iffy.) A weird photo of another bloody guy that didn’t make it.

            That almost unrecognizable face resolved itself into a battered Sam.

            He killed Sam. He remembered it. He killed Sam with a hammer. “Sammy,” he said involuntarily, out loud.

            It had always been true. Cain had told him. How many times had he almost killed Sam? How long had he known it was just a matter of time before he failed and worse—

            Sammy sammy sammy.

            The phone in his hand rang. “Dean. Dean! Dean is that you?”

            He couldn’t answer.

            “Dean? Are you all right?”

            “Who is this?” he managed.

            “It’s Cas. Where are you?”

            “Sam,” Dean said.

            “Tell me where you are,” Cas said.

            “Chicago,” Dean said.  Hearing Cas' voice was like water in the desert.  Cas was the only thing he had left in the world.

            “Can you give me an address?”

            Dean squinted at a street sign. “Clark St. Cas…Sam.”

            “I know,” Cas said, his voice heavy. “I’m coming Dean. Don’t do anything. Your mom is here, I’m here. We…we need you.”

            Dean dropped the phone. Let them take care of themselves. Let the world take care of itself. He sat down on the sidewalk. It was a little after three in the morning and a Don’t Walk sign flashed reflected in the damp street. It started drizzling. The cold was of the sidewalk came through his jeans.

            What was he supposed to do? Just tell him, what was he supposed to do? He’d fucked it up. One good shining thing and he’d watched be ground down by the plans of angels and demons. When they brought Sam back from the Cage, it was only because of Soulless and all those months of the Great Wall of Sam that there was even someone to stitch together. He knew, he knew if they had brought Sam straight back from almost two centuries of the Cage they couldn’t have kept him alive. If they could find him alive in the Empty…the Empty was worse than… but Billie was dead and that meant that they could bring Sam back. But that also meant Sam might be in Heaven and Sam might be happy. Happy with his dog, and with Jess and his college friends… Happy having Thanksgiving.

            He needed Sam back do badly. He couldn’t do it without Sam. Sam would understand.

            There was a song stuck in his head. He ignored it.  _You never give me your money/You only give me your funny paper/And in the middle of negotiations/You break down…_

            He shouldn’t bring Sam back. He’d left Sam in the Cage. He’d let Sam jump into the Cage. How could he have let Sam do that?

            The Cage was the worst of Hell. When he went to Hell it revealed the worst of him, revealed what he was. When Sam went to the Cage it revealed that Sam was…he had seen Sam’s soul when Death pulled it out of his bag. Sam was like Dad. He’d have never climbed off that rack. He’d have never become what Dean was.

            _I never give you my number/I only give you my situation/And in the middle of investigation/I break down…_

            What was that fucking song? It was familiar but he couldn’t quite place it.

            _Beatles._

            He felt sick. That voice. It should have been gone. He’d driven it out. He’d won.

_You’re boring me to tears. Side two of Abbey Road. One of those things John Winchester would listen to, but the tape broke when you were what, eight or nine? And he really preferred Metallica. All this Samsamsam. Sam Winchester was a wimp. The Boy King could have made a Knight of Hell look like a second rate lounge singer. Although Lucifer, not my favorite guy, so in the long run, maybe for the best._

_I mean really. You remember being a Knight of Hell and think that’s enough to take control?_

Everything

flickered

and

he

was

back in the loft

and the girl from the club

was on the bed. He had

never

ever

left.

She had closed her eyes.

            She jerked, eyes wide.

            _Reality. What’s real Dean? Is this another head game? Or is_ this _real?_

            “You’ve done really well not screaming,” the demon said with Dean’s voice. “But now I’m afraid you won’t be able not to.”

            Dean’s hands had a scarf in them, a filmy thing. The girl opened her mouth to scream and he gagged her. She still made noise.

            _I like when they make noise, don’t you?_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is "You Never Give Me Your Money" from the suite of songs on the B side of Abbey Road. It's not on YouTube so no link but it is on Spotify.


	5. Five (Mary.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mary, Sam, and Cas track a demon.

            As far as Mary could tell, Sam didn’t sleep. She knew it was not literally true. After the first day, the weird, hyper-focused thing disappeared and the Sam she recognized resurfaced; smart, somewhat diffident in her presence. But it was impossible to forget that meal bought for a brother who wasn’t even there or the blood in his hair, his hand catching it again and again while he seemed so completely unaware.

            She found him on the fourth morning in the parking lot, drinking coffee. He was sweaty and dressed like he had been running. “Do you run every morning?” she asked.

            “Not every morning,” he said. “But I try to do at least three miles most mornings.”

            “Your dad used to run,” she said.

            “He had us do it,” Sam said.

            “He said it helped him feel connected.” She crossed her arms and looked across the parking lot. The street was busy, three lanes of traffic each way. No place for anyone to walk. Everything had gotten even more set up for cars and less for people since she died. Except there were all these malls now, like people had to be indoors.

            “Connected?” Sam asked.

            “Yeah, after Vietnam. John said that sometimes he felt disconnected from everything. Like he almost wasn’t really in his body.”

            Sam nodded. “It’s called ‘disassociation’. It’s a symptom of PTSD, you know, battle fatigue. You want some coffee?”

            “Sure,” she said. She thought he would head into the hotel room but he walked down the walkway and she followed him. There was a little strip mall next door and it had a place that sold coffee and doughnuts.

            “Better than the stuff in the rooms,” he said. His sweat pants had pockets and he fished out a wallet and bought her a coffee. If there was one thing that was much better now, it was coffee. She was about to ask him about his running and PTSD but he beat her to the punch. “Did running help dad?”

            It was so hard to think about John. Her fatherless boy. Her husband with grease on his knuckles. He had been the most beautiful man she had ever seen when she was nineteen. He had grown out the beard because no one took him seriously; they didn’t believe he could fix a car, much less manage a shop. He’d learned to drop his voice.

            He was never going to walk in the door to the house in Lawrence again, swing Dean up and ask if she’d made spaghetti or spaghetti? And laugh.

            “Having a family saved John,” she said.

            He nodded and looked down at his own coffee.

            “Do you want a family?” she asked.

            When he frowned a little, the lines of his forehead pinched above his nose. “I have a family,” he said.

            “I meant children. A wife.”

            “No…not children,” he said. He looked as if he was about to say something but instead he studied the back of his hands. He had big hands, the blue veins standing in them. She had cold hands a lot but when he touched her, she’d noticed his hands were usually warm. Good blood circulation.

            “Dean,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I always knew Dean would be a good father.” He cleared his throat again.

            She knew she should ask him things. Ask him about what it had been like growing up. Ask him about what had happened to him, the things that he and Dean seemed to be talking around but grief was so heavy she wasn’t sure she could carry any more. She didn’t really understand Sam. Dean she could. She didn’t like that he was so angry at her but she understood it. Dean was easy to love even with all his sharp angles. He was funny and when he wanted to be, open.

            Sam could be tortured for days and then sit at a dinner table like nothing had happened. One day he was buying food for someone who wasn’t even there, the next he was asking her about John and jogging. Sam was a secret.

            The silence stretched. Awkward.

            “How are you? How are you doing? How are you liking the future?” Sam asked.

            “I was hoping for flying cars,” Mary said.

 

#

(Sam.)

            They found a demon in outside Grand Rapids, Minnesota. It was the fifth night Dean had been gone. Sam had hoped the first few days that he’d get a call from Dean telling him that he’d had managed to drive the demon out. He wanted to tell Dean, ‘Don’t fight, find your humanity. Remember what it is to be human. It’s not about anger, it’s about love. Demons feed off of anger and fear.’ Dean was strong. Dean loved so strongly. If Sam could just get him to feel that. He remembered the moment in Stull when he saw those green army men and he’d had that feeling, that want of everything the back seat of the Impala was and he’d felt Lucifer draw back from it.  

            “Cattle mutilation,” Mary said. She was driving.

            Sam was in the passenger seating, clicking through tabs on his laptop. “Yeah, and lightning with no rain.”

            “Has Crowley ever explained the cattle mutilation thing?” Mary asked.

            Sam was so used to looking for cattle mutilation he never really considered it. He knew what it was but it had been years since he’d looked at a mutilated cow. Cows, sometimes other animals, found dead for no reason and drained of all their blood. Usually their eyes were missing and often, if they were bulls or steers, their genitals. For some reason, their rectum was often missing. “I never thought about it,” Sam said.

            “Yeah,” Mary said. “Anything he said would probably be something I didn’t want to hear.”

            “Or have in my brain,” Sam agreed.

            There was a moment a silence.

            “Rectums,” Sam said.

            “You had to go there,” Mary said.

            “It’s an inverted form of an angelic ritual,” Cas said from the back seat. “Humans used a version of it when they sacrificed animals in the temple. But in the human and angelic version, the animal is purified, the death is clean and sanctified by burning the corpse.”

            Sam looked back at him.

            “The preferred sacrifice for the angelic ritual is a goat,” Cas said, a shape in the dark. “But sacrificing to my father and angelic rituals fell out of practice a few millennia ago.”

            “Goats?” Mary said.

            “Yes,” Cas said, matter of fact. Sam could picture him, earnest and slightly flat looking. So Cas, even in the dark.

            “It feels as if there is some sort of joke in there about goats,” Sam said.

            “It is not a joke, Sam.”

            “It might be funnier in the original Enochian,” Sam said.

            Mary glanced at Sam.

            Cas cocked his head, perplexed. Sam could see him as a shape against the rear window, and then could tell when Cas got it. “Right. Yes. Many things involving goats are better in the original Enochian. Yes, Sam, that is true.” He sounded so happy to have gotten the reference. “That’s funny, Sam.”

            Sam wished he hadn’t said that. Dean was out there being tortured and Sam was making witty remarks about cattle mutilation.

            The highway was dark and empty, trees close to the road on either side.

            “Up ahead,” Sam said. There was a metal crossing gate on the side of the road with a little reflector set in it. He caught the wink of the red reflector. “Turn there.”

            It was a narrow track, two lines of gravel with weeds in the middle more than a real driveway. The Impala bumped its way slowly, headlights off. It was as if Mary could feel the road through the steering wheel. She drove like Dean.

            Moved by some impulse he couldn’t explain, Sam rolled the window down and took a breath. He was open to everything; hearing the crunch of gravel under the wheels and trying to feel out into the darkness around him. There was a time he would have felt the demon ahead of them but that was burned out by Lilith. (Or it crawled through his veins still but he would die rather than be that thing again; black-eyed abomination stretching out a hand and knowing the essence of those things, able to twist it, wring it out, eventually snuff it out like a candle, thrumming in his bones like an unholy bass line, something to pass to his children if he ever had them—)

            He should have been able to know if Dean was there.

            Mary stopped the car and they got out, leaving the doors not quite closed rather than risk the noise.

            He couldn’t get his hopes up. It wasn’t really likely that this was Dean. There was some evidence that this demon had been here for more than a day or two. He needed it to be Dean. Dean had been possessed for five nights. He knew what could happen to a body ridden for five days and nights. Meg was relatively kind to him because the angels and demons had plans for the Boy King but there were no plans now, no insurance for Dean. It had to be Dean because he needed it to be Dean because he needed Dean to be alive. He needed Cas to be there if Dean needed him. He was pretty sure Cas needed to be there, too.

            He was tempted to try to reach out. There was no power there; Lilith burned it out. It had been almost a decade and there was no power there or he would have known. He was empty. A husk. A big, mostly human shell of a guy who was once a monster and who now had a worn out, shriveled, scarred up soul rattling around inside a big body like a seed in a pod.

            There were willows near a brick ranch house that appeared to have been built in the 50’s or 60’s. It was dark; the windows intact but the house asleep. Willows were trash trees that grew fast, dropped their whip thin branches everywhere, and often fell over. When Sam was a kid he remembered playing under one and climbing it and thinking they were wonderful but now he wondered who or what had thought a bunch of weeping willows was a great idea. Until the ground got steadily wetter under his feet and he began to suspect they weren’t planted here but grew on their own. Someone built a house in the middle of a swamp. It was a wonder it was still standing.

            He had cattle mutilation and the idea of Dean’s soul, gleaming like mithrial, and demon sludge near that shining thing all roiling in the back of his head.

            Mary and Cas went in the back door and he went in the front.

            It was a man and for just the slightest moment in the dimness but no Sam knew it wasn’t Dean and he knew he had to just shut everything off. Do the thing. Find out if the demon knew anything. Keep his people safe.

            He fired a bullet with a devil’s trap into its shoulder without even thinking about it. He needed to trap it here and anything else would give it a chance to smoke out. He could worry about the host later.

            The demon was wearing a guy in his fifties--some poor slob in a stained sweatshirt and cargo pants. It started to laugh and then realized that something was different.  “What did—what—” the demon said.

            “Sam?” Mary said. “Did you just…” Her face in the crossing flashlight beams looked like it was lit for some horror story told around a campfire.

            “You’re trapped here,” Sam said to the demon. “See this?” He unsheathed the Kurdish knife. “This isn’t just about going back to hell and trying to get topside again. This is it.”

            “Oh, right,” the demon said. “Like a knife is going to hurt me.”

            “I’m Sam Winchester and a demon has possessed my brother,” Sam said. “You’re either useful to me or you’re in my way. Now which way is it going to go?”

 


	6. Six (Dean.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The demon meets Donna Hanscum.

            _…waking up in the stinking sheets after a night partying with Crowley and the memory of the woman in his bed, her hair an angry mess of after hairspray and her eyes dead. “I hate it when the molly wears off,” she said, “and I remember how much I want to die.”_

_“So go ahead,” Dean said. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”_

_She was the kind of woman he normally didn’t pick up but as a Knight of Hell, his standards had changed. He had liked them damaged and desperate. He looked at the way that hit her. She was used to uncaring people but her armor against it sucked and he knew he had found a sweet spot. Just like having her on the rack in front of him only this time with emotions. Remembering it made him want to get up, walk out of the room, drive away from this. He tried to close his eyes._

_“You’re an asshole,” she said and got up. She stood with her back to him, pulling on a t-shirt. He noted absently that she had cellulite._

_Then waking up alone in the morning. Sure, a Knight of Hell didn’t care how anyone felt but it turned out not caring wasn’t the best thing in the world. It turned out being damned was pretty awful all in itself. Turned out when you knew you were never going to die, the years stretched out ahead of you with nothing to fill them. No Sam, no Cas, no real satisfaction from anything. Always looking for the next buzz of excitement to fill the moment and make him stop thinking about how little it all meant._

_Hell is a horrible emptiness where sometimes even pain is better than nothing.  Fight, fuck, get drunk or high, staring at the square of sunlight crossing the sheet and wishing he cared as much as the woman last night who wanted to die—_

            “Dean? You sure you’re okay there, buddy?”

            He blinked, dropped into consciousness. Donna Hanscum was sitting across a table from him in some pizza place. He could smell the pizza. They were playing “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay over the sound system. _I used to roll the dice/Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes…_

            “I’m great, sheriff,” the demon said. It picked up a menu; Sammy’s Pizza and Restaurant. _Ironic, eh Dean. How about a memorial dinner to the late, great Sam Winchester?_

            “I used to get the Seafood Alfredo,” Donna said conspiratorially. “Fettucini Alfredo and shrimp.” She rolled her eyes. “It was a carbfest, hoo-boy. But,” she looked over at the row of offerings, “The salad bar is really great. I’m thinking of trying that Paleo diet.”

            “If I ordered it,” the demon said, leaning forward as if pasta were their little office romance, “it wouldn’t be that bad if you had a couple of bites, would it?”

            Donna made that pleased, girlish face she did.

            “So how’s Doug,” the demon said. “I mean, new Doug of course.”

            Coldplay sang, _For some reason I can’t explain/I know St. Peter won’t call my name._ Was this real? Was this like the demon making him think that he had beaten him? He really wasn’t here, having lunch with Donna Hanscum.

            _But you are_ , the demon crooned.

 

 

#

(Sam.) 

            “Jody,” Sam said. “Have you talked to Sheriff Hanscum?”

            Mary was driving.

            Cas had managed to save the Swamp House’s demon host from dying but the guy wasn’t in good shape emotionally. Or, Sam thought, mentally. They were going to drop him in town with an anonymous call to 911.

            Right now the man was sitting in the back seat next to Cas, or rather he was sobbing and rocking back and forth. He’d been that way since Mary had tried to explain to him what had happened to him. “Oh Jesus, Lord and Savior,” he kept saying over and over and over.

            “Donna? Not for a week or so,” Jody said. “What is that noise?

            Sam stuck his finger in his ear. “Someone who was possessed. They’re all right now.”

            “They don’t sound all right.”

            Cas put two fingers to the man’s forehead and he slumped into unconsciousness.

           Sam gave a half-smile of thanks. “Did you by any chance warn Donna about Dean?”

           “Warn her?” Jody sucked in a breath. “Do you think—”

           “We’re just outside Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The demon possessing Dean might be in the state.

           “Hold on,” Jody said.

           Then a moment later, “I’m only getting her voicemail,” Jody said. “I left her a message to call me, that it was an emergency.”

           “We’re on our way.”

           “Who’s we?”

           “Mom and Cas are with me.”

            “I’ll meet you there,” Jody said.

 

#

(Dean.)

            Donna was terrified. She had no poker face. The demon had used her own handcuffs to lock her arms behind her. Her living room was decorated with breakable stuff. A porcelain Easter basket and an owl and an Easter egg in the same style. A blue lighthouse. It was all so Donna it made Dean’s heart break.

            He tried to rouse up anger. He didn’t have it. He couldn’t do anything but just feel.

            _Broken broken broken._

            Donna didn’t deserve this. Donna was good. Solid gold, all the way down.

            “Dean,” she said.

            “Oh, honey, he’s listening,” the demon said. “How do you feel about being the victim in a horror movie? Hmmm?”

            The demon wandered around the living room. One wall was brick, with a fireplace right in the middle. It was so…nice. Dean wanted everything to be nice for Donna. He reminded himself Donna was a sheriff. She saw everything. Suicides, car accidents. Donna wasn’t an innocent.

            _The demon had been showing nonstop twenty-four hour replay of the rack, with Alistair teaching him things like if you drain the blood out of someone you can cut them open and see the way ligament stretches over muscle going from white to transparent. Cut the ligaments one by one and learn what they do, arms flailing but without any ability to lift, the shudders running in ripples through the body if he did it just right. That’s what we’re going to do to Donna, see, the demon said._

_You’re an artist, Dean. Think you can do it before she bleeds out?_

            “You know how in horror movies there are different types?” the demon asked.

            “I don’t watch horror movies,” Donna said.

            “Well, there’s the hero, and then there’s all these other characters. The jock. The nerd.” The demon ran a hand across the top of Donna’s head. Her hair was so clean! So shining. “The love interest. Do you think you’re the love interest?”

            Donna shook her head a little, very fast.

            “You want to see what happened to the love interest?” the demon asked. He pulled out his phone and there was the image of Sam, blood spattered on the concrete, the soft white of his eye in the wrong place. The demon showed her the phone. “Usually the love interest lives,” the demon said.

            Donna didn’t make any noise. She just looked.

            “Oh, that’s Sam, in case you can’t tell,” the demon said.

            “I know,” she said.

            So who are you? You’re not a nerd or a jock. Who are you?” The demon walked behind her and put it’s hands on her shoulders. She flinched. It kneaded her shoulders. Then it leaned down and whispered in her ear. “You’re the fat best friend, aren’t you.”

            Donna closed her eyes. She was crying now. Silently.

            “They tend to die early in the movie because they’re pretty expendable, aren’t they. They say sensible things like, there’s no such thing as monsters or this party is crazy so I’m going home. And then what happens?”

            Donna was wearing little oval turquoise earrings. The shell of her ear was pale pink.

            The demon straightened up, dug Dean’s hands deep into her shoulders and Donna wrenched. “I said, what happens, Donna.”

            “They die,” she said. Her voice was steady.

            Dean wanted to go back to Hell. Wanted to be put back on a rack. He deserved it. This had to end.

            “Of course,” the demon said, “you could audition for the newly open role of romantic lead. Want to get naked, Donna?”

            “Stuff it, Smokeface,” Donna said.

            For a moment, Dean felt so proud of her courage—and something in the demons hold wavered. It was gone so fast.

            Dean grabbed at the thought, so proud of her. Donna was silly sometimes but if the world were full of people like Donna, think of what kind of place it could be. Not because she was homespun and corny but because she dealt with real life everyday and chose to stay like this. With her cozy house that looked at sweet but underneath was built solid and well to keep out the Minnesota below zero winters. He was a little in love with her at this moment, he thought.

            He could push the demon, feel it drawing away.

            Sam looking at him in Stull, really connecting.

            Connect with Donna. Connect with everything that was good about her.

            He could feel the demon as separate from him and it was like trying to grab a furious cat. It hurt in places he didn’t know could hurt, like it was tearing at his soul. He kept his eyes on Donna’s blue ones. So scared and so defiant.

            “It’s…me,” Dean grated out. “I’ve got it.”

            Donna just stared at him. She didn’t know what he meant.

            Dean managed to straighten up and grab the key.

            “It’s really Dean, it’s me. I’ve got him,” he said. Moving meant losing a little control and the demon started clawing it’s way back.

            Dean unlocked her handcuffs. “Run,” he said. “I’ll hold it as long as I can. You’re beautiful, Donna.”

            Donna Hanscum shook her hands free and ran, but not for the door.

            “Get out,” Dean yelled. He was afraid for her and fear was an emotion the demon could use. It swarmed back into him and it closed his eyes. He knew when he turned around to go after her, he was sure his eyes were black.

            He was met with a face full of salt.

            He stopped and was met with another face full of acid of some sort. He stumbled back. He shook his head and got a glimpse of her just before she threw more liquid on him. Holy water. God! It burned! Holy fuck!

            Someone was pounding on the front door. “DONNA!” yelled a man’s voice. It sounded like Sam but Sam was dead.

            “BREAK THE DOOR!” she shouted and splashed holy water again.

            The door shivered under the impact of someone hitting it.

            He went for her and she ran.

            The door thudded again and then he heard it break behind him. Someone had to be both strong and determined to come through a front storm door.

            “ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursion infernalis adversarii, omnis legio—_ ”

            It was Sam. So this wasn’t real? Why was the demon showing him Sam at the door with the demon knife and holy water? Was this another ‘rescue’ that would end with him back here torturing Donna?

            The demon flicked it’s wrist and Sam was flung to the side. Cas stalked in behind him, angel blade in hand.

            “Cas,” the demon said in perfect imitation of his own voice, “don’t hurt me!”

            Mary was behind Cas, continuing the exorcism and he could feel the demon writhing. It broke and tried to run but Donna was at the back sliding doors. She looked wild-eyed and scared but she flung holy water in his face.

            The demon smoked out.

            It was a strange, horrible sensation, having the demon come out of him. It went on and on, straining his neck and jaws and making him feel as if something was pulling him inside out.

            Then it was out and Cas grabbed him.

            He felt a wave of dizziness, lost his ability to stand. Sam was getting back to his feet, chanting. He was well into the second half of the exorcism, the part that sent the demon to hell. _…invocato a_ _nobis sancto et terribili nomine,_ _quem inferi tremunt._ Smoke was trying to escape. They hadn’t had time to do a devil’s trap so it would probably escape.

            The smoke swirled and went for Sam.  Mary picked up the chant and the smoke dropped to the rug, swirling and sending sparks and embers, burning stinking swirls into Donna’s rug. And then it was gone.

            “Dean!” Sam said.

            He was staring at Sam and the world was getting farther away. Everything was black around the edges of his vision and it kept coming in until he couldn’t see anything.

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sammy’s Pizza and Restaurant is a real place in Hibbing.


	7. Seven (Sam.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam watches as Dean tries to adjust to post-possession life.

            Sam touched Dean’s shoulder. Dean was alive. In pretty good shape for someone who’d been demon ridden for almost a week. They’d laid him out on Donna’s nice blue couch and he looked like he was napping in the warm light of Donna’s lamps. He’d had a lot of internal wear and tear, Cas said. “He’s been ‘rode hard and put away rough’,” Cas finger quoted. He’d been in a fistfight of some kind at some point and someone might have kicked him in a kidney. He hadn’t slept in six days. He was dehydrated. He’d have been peeing blood if Cas hadn’t healed him.

            By the standards of demon possession, this was great.

            Sam tried to really be mindful, to ground himself. Everything had been directed towards this moment of getting Dean back safe and now Sam could take a breath. Sam’s mind was working but he wasn’t feeling anything. He felt the solidity of Dean’s shoulder under his hand. He listened.

            Donna was talking to Jody on the phone and it sounded like Jody was still coming in to stay with her.

            Mary made coffee in Donna’s clean kitchen.

            There was the smell of sulfur and ash from the rug.

            Cas was hovering behind the couch. Well, hovering was not really what Cas did. For an angel, when he stood and waited, he had a certain amount of gravity. Right now he was the size of the Chrysler Building.

            “There’s two bottles of chardonnay in the fridge,” Donna called, apparently to Mary.  

            This was Dean.  Dean was here.  It was over.  Some part of his mind could stand down now, stop driving everything forward.  He still felt the need to do something.  That deandeandean still a high constant alarm.  Sam took Dean’s boots off and placed them side by side next to the couch. Dean started stirring as he did.

            “Easy,” Sam said.

            Dean said, “Sammy?”

            Sam put his hand on Dean’s arm. “We’re here. The demon is gone. We got it. You’re safe.”

            “How do—” he started coughing instead.

            Sam had a bottle of water for him and helped him sit and take sips. “What do you remember?”

            “Lots,” Dean bit out. “This isn’t real. You’re dead. I hit you with a hammer.” Dean had his game face on, still fighting.

            “Oh, it’s real,” Donna said. “That rug is ruined.”

            “You hit me but Cas heard me praying and healed me,” Sam said.

            Dean pulled away. “Not buying it,” he said to the air. “Good show.”

            Cas frowned.

            Sam reached over and grabbed his brother, Dean’s tension knotted shoulder under a t-shirt too solid under his hand. He _knew_ what Dean needed. Dean needed to be grounded, to know that this was all real. “Listen. I prayed to Cas. Cas called Crowley who popped him to bunker, found our research and tracked me down.”

            “He was severely injured,” Cas said. “He is fine now.”

            “Then we called Mom and told her not to answer the phone if you called. We’ve been chasing the demon for almost a week,” Sam said.

            Dean swallowed.

            “I can prove this is real,” Sam said. “I accidently left your 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken baseball card in a gas station restroom in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania when I was seven.”

            Dean looked at him for a moment. It was clear he wasn’t following. Then the gears slowly started to turn. “Wait, what?”

            “Your prized 1989 Billy Ripken baseball card,” Sam said.

            “The ‘Fuck Face’ card? You little rat!” Blood came back into his face.

            It had been a big deal. Dean didn’t collect baseball cards. They didn’t collect anything but miles on the Impala but for whatever reason he’d bought some packs. As only Dean could he managed to get a baseball card of infielder Billy Ripken. Importantly, when the photo was taken, no one had noticed that Fuck Face was written neatly on the butt of the baseball bat. Dean had loved the card on general principle.  

            Sam shrugged. “I borrowed it to show it to a guy at my school. Then Dad picked us up right after school and took up upstate to do something, a salt and burn, probably. I was going to put it back but I accidently left it in a gas station.”

            Dean was staring at him. “That card was awesome. I thought I lost it!”

            Sam nodded. “I felt horrible. I never told you because I felt horrible.”

            “Do you know what that card would be worth?” Trust Dean to get completely derailed.

            “About $5.00. I check it out on Ebay once in awhile. So you see?” Sam said. “You’re safe. You haven’t thought about that card in years. No demon would make that up.”

            Dean stared at him, working it all out.

            “You’re safe,” Sam said again. “It’s over.”

            Then Dean said something that made Sam want it all to go away— “Sammy,” Dean whispered, “it was in my head.”

            Sam grabbed his brother and pulled him tight against him. “I know,” he murmured. “I know. But it’s over and the demon is dead. We’re going home now.”

            Cas stood above them like an angel in a graveyard, expression impenetrable and old.

 

#

(Dean.) 

            Dean sighed when they crossed the devil’s trap into the bunker. Sam saw it. Saw him release his shoulders and just take a breath.

            Sam just said, “Beer?” and headed for the kitchen.

            Dean was thinking about the devil’s trap inscribed in the floor under Sam’s bed. It was initially in paint but sometime over the years, Sam had taken a concrete saw and engraved the thing. Dean didn’t know when. The concrete saw was just there one day with their other tools and Sam had apparently done it when he was out.

            He was thinking it was a good idea.

            They drank beer and Mary went out to bring back dinner.

            He got up to go to his room and both Sam and Cas started to stand. Sam glanced at Cas and settled back in his seat. Cas trailed him down the hallway of the Bunker to his room.

            “Think you could help me move the bed?” Dean asked.

            “Of course,” Cas said.

            He found a can of white spray paint and brought it back. Cas had pushed the bed to the edge of the room.

            “What are you doing?” Cas asked.

            “Sammy has a devil’s trap under his bed.” He really didn’t want to explain. Cas didn’t ask. Instead he casually stood Dean’s bed on its side against the wall to make more room. Cas rarely did things like that, showed how strong he could be, it always took Dean by surprise.

            “Sam is the one who usually does the traps,” Cas observed.

            “Yeah, well I’m quite capable of painting one, thank you,” Dean growled.

            “Heptagram or pentagram?” Sam said from the door.

            The heptagram had been on the ceiling at Bobby’s house. It was strong but complicated. Right now Dean just wanted to be able to go to bed and sleep. “Pentagram. Same as the dungeon.”

            Sam held out his hand and Dean handed him the paint can. Sam eyed the room, shaking the can. “Bed in the usual place?” he asked.

            Cas held the center string while Sam inscribed a circle and then Dean and Cas watched as Sam laid the trap down in careful, steady bursts of paint. It was all really familiar, watching Sam build up the trap and the smell of fresh paint.

            Was it real? How do you test reality? Billy Ripken, 1988. Had that really happened? Had Sam really left the baseball card in a gas station bathroom? Had the demon concocted all of this and would he suddenly find himself back in Hibbing, ready to slowly murder Donna?

            “When do you start feeling like things are real?” he asked.

            Sam was crouched, wide shoulders covered in red and black plaid, writing the symbols. He looked up and shook his hair back. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if anything is real anymore. I just go with it.”

           

#

(Mary.)           

            Mary watched Dean wander the bunker at odd hours. She would know Sam was busy and see Dean heading towards the kitchen with a look she thought of as ‘white-knuckling’. She would wait for a moment and think she’d follow him and see if maybe he wanted company or wanted to talk but when she got to the kitchen, Sam would already be there. Like he had some device that told him when Dean was adrift.

            He’d be sitting at the table while Dean got a cup of coffee. Dean would sit down at the chair next to him.

            Sam would look up and smile at her and her boys would be shoulder to shoulder.

            It wasn’t that they weren’t glad to see her. It was that there was no space between them for anyone else. They didn’t need her here. What they wanted from her she couldn’t give. Neither one of them would talk to her about anything that wasn’t immediate. She’d read John’s journal, seen the dates on the hunts, noticed that John had left them for weeks at a time and figured out they’d been all over the country. Living on the road.

            All the things she’d heard hints of. Dean in Hell, Sam possessed by…well according to Crowley, lots of things. Questions were met with evasions. Neither boy wanted to talk about the past.

            Neither man. They were older than she was even though she felt weirdly old.

            The way they danced around any conversation about John.

            Dean was so angry at her for not being around enough but neither one had really shown any signs of letting her in. Not really. And she wasn’t sure how much she could take.

            She wanted John. Even if she had been the one in the family who handled things while John worked and put himself back together after Vietnam. Even if she had been the one who was there for him. Even if these were her boys and it was her job to be strong for them. She didn’t feel very strong. She felt lost.

            Ketch promised her that they could kill monsters. The BMoL had a way she could really make their lives better.

            When she couldn’t hide her need to cry anymore, she made excuses and went on the road ‘for a few days.’

            She sobbed in a motel room. She ached with grief so much. She wanted her life back.

            She sat on the bed, rocking herself, and said over and over, “Come back. I need you. You come back!”

            John didn’t come.

 

#

(Sam.) 

            Watching Dean prep the floor of his room for a Seal of Solomon was…a very Dean experience. It was like when Dean worked on the Impala. First there was a lot of cleaning using a degreaser and detergent. Then Sam re-marked the seal, this time with an eye towards permanence. They took turns with the concrete saw, making the lines much cleaner and smoother than Sam had bothered with in his own room.

            Dean filled the lines in with white filler and then used concrete stain and a DIY book on how to do decorative painting to make some of the concrete look like red granite. The rest he stained dark gray. The result, when it was finished, looked like a very expensive tile job in the middle of the room.

            “There you go, Sammy,” Dean said. “You want the same in your room?”

            “Mine’s fine.”

            Dean gestured to the beauty that was his floor. “Come on! How can you not want this?”

            “I don’t want you telling me what a sloppy job I did when I made mine,” Sam said.

            “It is very beautiful,” Cas said. “But nobody will be able to see most of it because of your bed.”

            “Any job worth doing is worth doing right,” Dean proclaimed.

            Sam thought any job worth doing was worth doing in better ventilation than a floor fan sitting in the doorway sending sealant fumes into the hallway. The room was making him lightheaded.

            “The Bunker likes it,” Cas said.

            Dean looked at Cas and then at Sam. The mysterious ways of the Bunker were best not discussed. “Time for beer.”

            They didn’t hunt for a couple of weeks. Dean was very busy around the Bunker, suddenly convinced that the kitchen needed to be scrubbed as if a Health Inspector was coming and then that the Impala’s carburetor needed adjustment (which required Cas to help by sitting in the driver’s seat while the engine was running and give it gas so Dean could listen.)

            Sam waited, making grocery runs and liquor runs and pretending not to notice the speed with which both of them were going through the booze.

            He had to be careful about drinking. Dean cracked at odd times. Late at night, sitting in the middle of his bed, drunk and squeezing his hands into fists. Cas woke Sam and Sam sat down on the bed feeling awkward and uncomfortable because Dean was in the middle and Sam didn’t want to crowd him but the beds weren’t really that big.

            Eventually Dean said, “Go back to bed.”

            “I was awake,” Sam lied.

            “Fuck off,” Dean growled.

            Sam waited.

            “I dreamed about the rack,” Dean said. “Do you know what kind of person I am? Do you?”

            “Yeah,” Sam said. “I’ve known you my entire life. You’re the guy who broke the demon’s hold so Donna could run.”

            “You broke Lucifer’s hold!”

            Sam shrugged. “I didn’t break Meg’s. I didn’t break Lucifer’s hold until you were there.”

            Sam didn’t think Dean would really believe him. Certainly not at first. Dean’s face was set, stubborn and angry. He wasn’t buying Sam’s ‘crapload of bullshit’ and it didn’t take him saying anything for Sam to know that.

            So Sam waited again. After a few minutes he said, “Netflix?”

            Dean wouldn’t shift.

            “There’s a new series called _Glitch_. All I know is there’s zombies.”

            “Fuck you,” Dean said but Sam could hear him crack a little. Nothing better than to sit at 3:00 in the morning and make fun of television zombies.

            “Or there’s a couple of Donnie Yen marital arts flicks we haven’t seen.”

            “Better than zombies. Zombies always have angst.”

            So they moved to Sam’s room and his inferior devil’s trap and Cas joined them.

            It was grinding, thinking about possession all the time and trying to focus on what Dean needed. Sam had gotten used to passing where Kevin had died but now it was back. He kept getting caught up in little rushes of memory and then checking his watch, thinking he’d lost time.

            Was he losing time?

            This was real. Had to be real.

            Then Dean wanted to hunt again.

            Sam had been sending hunts to Mary who was off doing whatever it was she did when she was finding herself. She had left after four days, driven out, Sam joked, by paint fumes. She’d stopped by after that bringing them fried chicken and grocery store pie, and then left again the next day.

            She seemed to have a network of hunters she could forward things on to.

            Sam sort of wished she’d stayed to help keep an eye on Dean but then Dean wouldn’t have talked to her or let her help so in the long run it was probably a good thing.

            They did a job in Maryland where the culprit turned out to be a _földi ördög,_ a Hungarian spirit that made a land development guy rich by killing off his rivals, appearing to them as an attractive human, seducing them, and sucking them dry. It could have turned into a shitstorm like the siren but the _földi ördög_ never saw Sam and Dean coming and they killed it with a stake made from birch. It turned into a black chicken when staked, which was a first.

            It helped put Dean back on his feet, metaphorically speaking. As did the road and the usual cheap motel and some really good burgers in Harrisburg, PA. Sam bought invisible UV paint and each night in a new hotel he painted a devil’s trap above every opening. Dean had an ultraviolet flashlight and painted dicks and balls around the light switches.

            Dean still dreamed and Sam pretended not to notice it unless Dean sat up or got up.

            The world felt no more and no less real than it had for the last couple of years.


	8. Eight (Sam.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Dean try to move on.

            They stopped in a place just outside Springfield, Illinois on their way back to Lebanon. Dean made _földi ördög_ jokes about Sam’s Caesar chicken salad while he ate his impossible double decker burger with bacon. Sam watched his brother do the thing where he burned through whatever it was he didn’t want to deal with, all happy to fight and drink and ignore.

They hit a bar. Dean was incandescent in this place; descending upon the mere mortals of Illinois like a god in disguise. Sam prayed that Dean would get lucky. Even more, that he would want to do something about it. Sex would be good for Dean, Sam told himself. Sam needed to drink a couple of beers and then sleep. Really sleep, at least for a few hours. He watched Dean lean against the bar and say something to the bartender who laughed, charmed against his own better judgment. He saw heads turn subtly. The Dean effect. Everyone watching.

            A woman came to the bar for drinks—not exactly Dean’s type, a little too office manager and not enough push-up bra but pretty and blond. Dean said something that made _her_ laugh. Then he was coming back with beers and shots for the two of them.

            Sam groaned. “No shots.”

            “Just one,” Dean said. “Do a shot with me and then we’ll head back. We’ll be home tomorrow.”

            Then another one. Usually Sam had a decent tolerance, at least compared to anyone but Dean and Cas (and Cas didn’t really count) but maybe it was because he’d been not sleeping.

            Dean nursed his beer while Sam thought about sleep.

            “You’re a good brother,” Dean said out of the blue.

            “Keys,” Sam said. “How many have you had when I wasn’t looking.”

            Dean shook his head. “You’re always looking. Not supposed to be your job.”

            “Yeah, well, someone’s got to keep you from getting bested by Hungarian chickens.” Sam didn’t like the way this was going. Suddenly didn’t like the bar which like most bars didn’t really have enough tables. People kept looking at them like they were not local.

            “That thing you said.” Dean traced a ring of condensation in the table. “About not knowing if things are real.”

            “I shouldn’t have said that,” Sam said. “It made it sound like I’m a raving lunatic. That wasn’t what I meant—”

            “I was supposed to be there for you,” Dean said.

            “Dude, how drunk are you?”

            Dean traced figure eights on the table with his finger. The juke box was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd; _gimme three steps, gimme three steps mister/gimme three steps towards the door_ and that sounded about like what Sam wanted.

            “Look, I’m ragged. Want to call it a night?” Sam said.

            “How do you do it?” Dean asked.

            Sam shook his head. He shouldn’t have said that. “After Meg, I got…things got normal again. You’re going to be all right.”

            “Not talking about me,” Dean said. “Sam. I…I can’t say I’d do anything different. But I didn’t understand before. I mean.”

            Didn’t understand that having something in your head, knowing everything about you, using it against you, is a particularly intimate form of rape. Didn’t know what it was like to not even know what to think of your own thoughts. Didn’t know what it was like to have something out in the world that had been in your head and knew things about you that no one should know. “It’s dead, you’re safe,” Sam said.

            Dean skewered him with a look. “I know why you keep telling me that. I get it. So I can know that all those things it knew about me are just mine again. But Sam—”

            Sam did not want to talk about Lucifer out there with two centuries of Sam Winchester’s thoughts at his fingertips. He pushed back from the table. “I’ll be outside.”

            Dean grabbed his arm. “Sammy.”

            He was hardwired to stop, he knew it.

            “I mean, Gadreel’s dead. Meg’s dead,” Dean said. “But Lucifer and Crowley--”     

            Sam yanked his arm away and said, “I’ll be outside,” through gritted teeth.

            The parking lot was cool. Sam’s face was hot.

            He looked up. No stars tonight, just clouds scudding and the moon illuminating a thin spot but not quite breaking through. Lucifer. Crowley had been in his head. And fucking Toni Bevell. Dean had to pay which gave him a moment to breathe. Goddamn it, why couldn’t Dean have scored tonight?

            He heard the door open, sound spilling out, and then Dean walking towards the Impala.

            “Sam—” Dean said.

            “You don’t get to do this,” Sam said as evenly as he could. When he turned around, Dean looked hurt.

            “I’m trying—” Dean started.

            Sam cut him off again. “I know what you’re trying and I appreciate it. But you don’t get to do this. I can’t. I can’t talk about this with you.” He couldn’t. He didn’t know if there was a person in the world he could talk to about it. Probably not. But he couldn’t talk to Dean.

            “Why not,” Dean said. “You used to want to talk. I was going to ask you if maybe you wanted to find something a little…a little more normal. A life.”

            It was the last thing Sam expected.

            Dean took the silence to mean Sam was angry. “Look, I’m not saying quit hunting. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just, I understand a lot of things I didn’t and I wanted…to know. I mean, after the thing with Gadreel and then everything.” Dean gestured at ‘everything’ to mean God only knew what. “Maybe we should think about finding something like Bobby’s place. You could…get used to reality.”

            Sam couldn’t help it. He laughed a little.

            Dean frowned.

            “I…there’s no normal for me,” Sam said. “I can’t go back to something. Look at me Dean. I can’t even talk to people anymore.”

            “You talk to people all the time!” Dean snapped.

            “Agent Rizer talks to people! I can’t even talk to Mom! She calls you! Everyone talks to you! I tried to reach out, to be there for her and all I did was make her uncomfortable!”

            “That’s not true,” Dean said.

            “It is true! The Banes twins call you. I’m thirty-two years old and I don’t have a car, or a, a friend.”

            “Jody calls you,” Dean said.

            Sam really did laugh then. “Yeah, you know why? Because I shot her kid so she wouldn’t have to. Great way to make friends. I’ll get my law degree and make partner by shooting someone’s kid. No, there’s no normal for me. I have a duffle bag full of clothes, half a college degree, and I can kill things. That’s it. I’m not like you, You could. You could be normal. You’d make a great dad. I can’t be like those people in there,” he waved at the bar. “I can’t even pass anymore.”

            “Oh come on,” Dean said. “Don’t be dramatic.”

            “Forget it. Just promise me that you’re not going to throw this at me at some hunt. Not going to say ‘how can I trust you to have my back when you don’t even know what’s real?’”

            “I’m not going to do that,” Dean said. But it had hit. Because they both knew that Dean could say things he regretted. Sam just had never called him on it this way. Everything they said in this windy parking lot was just revealing scar tissue.

“I’m sorry.” Sam was so tired. Here he was yelling at his brother three weeks after he’d survived possession. It was wrong.

            Don’t borrow trouble. Don’t look to the future and what someone might or might not do. Sam had figured it out, the future was always even more impossible than he could ever expect. Heaven sucked. Hell was worse. All his options had been closed off one by one. He had a narrow ledge left where he could be. “Just live right here, right now,” Sam said, his voice cracking. “Forget about real or not. You can’t control that. Just don’t screw up right here, right now. That’s all we’ve got. It’s like a ledge. That’s where I live, okay? I don’t need things. I don’t need much. But I need you and if you start talking about Gadreel again, or, or Lucifer, and you decide now, after all these years, that you want to say you get it, that things should have been different,” even Sam couldn’t make himself say, ‘That you want to apologize.’

            Dean was solid. Dean was good. For Dean to start undermining his own sense of righteousness, well, where would that leave Sam? “I mean, I guess I’ve dealt with a lot of crap and now you know more but I’m not going backwards. I’m not letting you dig all that up because you feel bad. I’m tired. You know? I’m just tired. Just…go with it. If it’s not real, you can’t do anything about it anyway. Accept what you can, deal with the rest when it comes back to bite you. If. If it comes back to bite you.” He didn’t add, ‘it always does.’ Because Dean would get over this. Dean would be all right.

            Dean looked him. Sam didn’t need a lot of light to know what Dean’s face looked like. He was hurt and angry. But he was also a little scared.

            Sam held out his arms. Dean wavered a moment and then stepped into the hug.

            “This,” Sam whispered quietly. “[Just this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OYlqUxqWwo).”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Matt Rasmussen's poem "After Suicide (In the Hallway of Life)" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/56549 from his collection Black Aperture.


End file.
